New To Web Development Forum

I'm new at this. I recently created a website for the child care center that is run out of our church. I'm using Dreamweaver MX 2004, just a template I downloaded online. I've pretty much finished the site and am trying to get it online. We have a domain/hosting from Yahoo business and I've set up an FTP which I know is working.

The problem that I'm having is that my "style" (I could be using the wrong term) isn't showing up online, just simply the text and links. I'm using a program called ClassicFTP for my mac to upload.

I don't use fancy tools like DreamWeaver so I don't know all the details, but the symptoms indicate that you have not uploaded all of the files that are needed from your computer to the server, or that the references to these files in the code of your pages is incorrect. Top suspects for missing files would be your templates, images, and .css files.

i would look at the path for the href attribute of the link rel="stylesheet" definition. if the path points to a disk file (for example it starts with C:) or is a relative path i would try specifying a fully qualified absolute path, for example: <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://example.com/styles/my.css"> then make sure you upload the css file to the right location - in this example, my.css should be uploaded to the styles directory in your document root directory.

Taking it one step further - or possibly making it easier to understand, the Mac paths are different than Windows - gain a small understanding of how servers work versus your Mac. On your server, there is no "Hard Drive:projects:web site" (lol . . been too long for me and the G3 here . . . )

Servers **usually** have what's called a document root, which is the "starting point" for your web site. In your web pages ,it is this:

/

So example.com/ is the "document root." (not always true, but usually.)

In your web pages, your links to CSS and images can then be accessed like so. If you have these "folders" on your server,

css images images/front-page

In your documents, set the paths like so:

/css/my-css.css /images/header.jpg /images/front-page/logo.gif

The leading slash is **almost** exactly what phranque is saying with the full URL. It always means "start at the domain root." So if you have this page,

/newsletters/2009/December/december.html

You don't have to do this:

../../../../images/header.jpg

because this will always start at the document root:

/images/header.jpg

Same result as this, just shorter

http://example.com/images/header.jpg

THE DOWN SIDE: When looking at these pages offline, / will fail because it requires a web server. The full URL won't fail if you have an always on connection, but it won't reflect local updates either, because it will be going out to the live site to get it.

So when working offline, use local paths, then just before uploading, change them to / or the full URL. DW has a robust find/replace feature that makes this sort of thing a snap.

I have just been debugging what sounds like an identical problem for a Dreamweaver user in another forum. In that case all references were to the c: drive.

When creating a site it is best to create a dedicated folder on the PC and save EVERYTHING there. This will immediately identify any additional files or folders that your editor has created. Then you just upload the lot, files and sub folders and don't miss any.

Not knowing if by "style" you are literally referring to CSS or simply the page design of your pages, here is a preliminary question because you mentioned downloading a template. When creating your pages, did you use New File From Template?

A common problem for the inexperienced is not realising that a template often includes a set of ancilliary files (.css, .js etc) which also need to be uploaded. A secondary problem is that some editors will happily create references using the drive paths on the development PC if you don't fully understand the settings.